The Dermatology Blog

Every new skin care product and berry juice touts its antioxidant properties and ability to keep you young and wrinkle free.

In theory, eating foods high in antioxidants like blueberries or acai berries, or applying topical antioxidants like vitamin C should soak up free radicals. However, in reality, consumed antioxidants do not concentrate in the skin (no matter how much Mona Vie you drink) and topically applied antioxidants degrade too quickly to have any effect (despite what they tell you in the infomercial).

To make matters worse, most antioxidants applied to the skin don’t penetrate the dead, outer skin and so cannot have any effect on the living skin below (sort of like trying to clean a window that is dirty on the outside by applying cleaner on the inside). That may change soon.

A group of physicians at Duke University is working to find a way to apply potent topical antioxidants which are stable, penetrate the skin, and have measurable damage-protecting abilities. Through years of research, they found that popular antioxidants such as vitamin C and vitamin E do not live up to their claims, and have little if any actual antioxidant properties when tested on the skin. Recently, however, they found that when vitamins C and E are combined with a special antioxidant derived from ferns called ferulic acid, the antioxidants stabilize each other and really do work.

By combining ferulic acid with the vitamin C and E, the researchers found that the antioxidants remain stable when applied and do not break down quickly. They then put their cream to the test; they applied the cream to people’s skin and fired a beam of skin-damaging ultraviolet light (a form of sunlight) at it. They then measured how red the skin got and biopsied the skin to see if the antioxidant cream did indeed protect cells from the ultraviolet radiation.

They found that the skin treated with the ferulic antioxidant cream had much less redness, many fewer damaged skin cells, and had less DNA damage as compared to the skin that was treated with a placebo cream.

Although there are countless creams that claim to make you look younger and protect you against damage, there are very few studies to support these claims. This study examined the actual antioxidant effect of a highly engineered cream and found that the combination of vitamins C, E, and ferulic acid does protect the skin from damaging oxidation.

Look for creams containing this triple combination of vitamins C, E, and ferulic acid, which I am sure will be available soon. They are probably filming an infomercial right now.